War is hell. No doubt about that. When a war lasts over twenty years, it’s even worse. Such is the case with personal computing platforms. The road is strewn with the corpses of the fallen: IBM, Commodore, Tandy, even Atari. We are left with the “Big Three”, Macintosh, Windows, and Linux. For years I’ve lived in the Windows world, and peered into the other two from a distance, rarely reaching out to touch the grass greener. At my last job, I brushed closest to them. I managed the web servers with Red Hat Linux and our primary client was a school district running entirely on Macs.

In that torturous year (torturous for more reasons than OS platforms) I gained a pretty good understanding of the philosophy behind each of the Big Three. Now for the first time, I have formulated a metaphor which, I believe, best describes how these things “think”.

Imagine your computer is a car, a utilitarian piece of machinery who’s sole purpose is to get you from point A to point B. When you slide into the driver’s seat, you are confronted with the operating system. The OS, then is the system of communication between you, the driver, and the mechanics of the car.

Let’s start with the left most end of the spectrum, the Macintosh. When you climb into your “iCar”, the first thing you notice is how plush it is. Soft, comfortable seats; huge windshield giving you a fantastic view of the road; and the best car audio system on the planet. Sure, it’s a little pricey, but what a ride! Once you’ve taken it all in, you decide to take it for a spin, but what’s this? There is no steering wheel! There are no peddles. Instead you have a single, big, shiny, back-lit button. It say’s “GO”. You press the button and miraculously the iCar drives you to work. “Brilliant!” you marvel. You press the button again, and the iCar drives you home. You never even had to look at the road. Then you decide to go out for dinner. “I think I’ll try that new Tex-Mex place,” you say. You press “GO” and before you know it, you’re sitting in front of the world’s best (and most expensive) Italian restaurant. “Wait. No. I want to go the the new Tex-Mex place. Besides, Italian gives me gas!” You press “GO” and the iCar promptly drives you to a newer, less reliable Italian place. “Are you deaf?! I said, ‘Tex-Mex’!” Before you know it, your parked outside of Pizza Hut. “Curse you, iCar!” you shout, banging the “GO” button with all your might. The iCar then promptly locks its doors trapping you inside until, hours later, you manage to kick out the side window and walk home.

In the center of the spectrum is Windows. The Win-mobile is exactly what you have come to expect from a car. Steering wheel, accelerator, brake, etc. There’s a radio, but each station plays more commercials than songs. There’s a CD player, but it destroyed your favorite CD last month, so you’re afraid to put another CD in it. You get behind the wheel and drive to work, battling traffic the whole way, bruising your behind on numerous pot-holes (program errors), cursing the tailgaters (pop-up ads), and around every corner is another construction zone (security update). After a grueling commute, you grudgingly get back into the Win-mobile to drive to dinner. You arrive at the Tex-Mex place only to find there’s a two-hour wait to be seated, because everyone in town decided to come to the same place to eat. The food is great, but was it really worth all the trouble?

Finally, on the right end of the spectrum, we have Linux. To your surprise, the car is totally free! You just walk up to the dealer, get in “car” (Linux is not real concerned with catchy names. Who needs marketing when it’s free?), and drive away. However, “car” also has no doors, no windshield, and no seat belts. If you want those, you’ll need to buy the Red Hat “car”. You decide it’s worth it. Now you feel a little more comfortable behind the… umm. Where’s the steering wheel? Oh, well, that comes standard with Suse “car” (but Suse has no doors), but if you really think you need it, you can get the wheel for free and bolt it on yourself. You do have you’re own wrench set, right? You manage to survive your commute, though you had to stop two or three times and tighten the bolts on your steering wheel, since the wrench wasn’t really the right size. Now it’s time for dinner. Where is that Tex-Mex place? Voila! You’re “car” comes with a phone book (man page). You open the book, look up “Tex-Mex”. Instead of directions to the restaurant, you find the following instructions. “Put fajita meat in tortilla. (These can be downloaded for free). Frozen margarita is strongly recommended. The tequila is in the trunk. Once you’re drunk, you should avoid the cops. Just in case, there’s a gun in the glove box.”